When your withdrawal strategy is planned*, let me know, I have some code to backtest it historically, so we can see if it's really superior to constant allocation or just some psychological peace-of-mind feel-good placebo BS :)
*It can be arbitrarily complex but only depend on market returns, stash amount, inflation, and only include bonds and US stocks.
So I ran some cFIREsim numbers results in table above. Comparing fixed stock/bond allocations to a sliding allocation where I went to 100% stocks in the first 10yrs. Ignore the third column over that says "fixed" I meant to delete that. The sliding allocation always produces lower success rates in cFIREsim.
If you want to simulate some withdrawal strategies you could try:
- $1M and $800K stash with $40K WRs [4% & 5%]
- $120K bonds for $1M & $100K for $800K
- any year where portfolio return is negative take $4K from bonds/-1% of the return up to -10%+ where you'll be at the full $40K
- if portfolio is equal or greater than starting value ignore the bond rule above in a year with negative returns
- don't rebalance, when bonds are gone let them run out and go 100% stocks
I'm open to other ways to implement. Just throwing some ideas to get the ball rolling.
Like Steveo my situation is more complicated and I have a number of government benefits kicking in 10 & 15yrs in plus done the mortgage after 15yrs assuming we don't buy another house. So getting through that first 15yrs is key.